Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): JARED MACKEN
This paper explores a disciplinary feud between theoretical figures of 20th century architectural discourse, and discovers an overlooked and forgotten architectural discourse on the city. The participants of the feud included Nathan Silver and Charles Jencks (authors of Adhocism) on one side of the fight, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter (authors of “Collage City”) on the other, and Reyner Banham who entered the fray in the middle as a mediator. While the feud was quite stinging—it consisted of an accusation of plagiarism from Nathan Silver—it was completely forgotten. This was because the fight occurred in the letters to the editor section of Architectural Review in 1975, with each jab and blow delayed across three different editions. Yet it is worth looking at since it links these two unexpectedly comparable projects—namely Adhocism and Collage City—with a very unlikely yet similar third project brought into the discussion by Reyner Banham. This third project was Hubert de Cronin Hastings’s theory he described as a Radical Picturesque which he details as an architectural manifesto for designing and reconstructing the post war English city. Radical Picturesque was described in Hastings’s article “Townscape” and published in Architectural Review in 1949. The article’s namesake and surface-level ideas lead to Gordon Cullen’s book The Concise Townscape (which was indeed inspired by Hastings’s original article), but it can be argued that the original text coupled with Banham’s link to Adhocism and “Collage City,” was not fully nor sufficiently realized in Cullen’s book or subsequent iterations of the Townscape movement. These three theories for the design of the city, when looked at together, has the potential to shed new light on 20th century architectural discourse on the city. This paper seeks to illuminate the original ideas that were a part of the Radical Picturesque in order to reinsert an architectural project on the city that was lost to dominant postwar architectural discourse.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.110.91
Volume Editors
Robert Gonzalez, Milton Curry & Monica Ponce de Leon
ISBN
978-1-944214-40-1
